


The Seafarer

by tracinginthesand



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Exhibitionism, Just a bit of Winter Soldier, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve Feels, Steve Remembers, Steve's Head - Interior, Unrequited Love, pre-Civil War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 15:05:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6758923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tracinginthesand/pseuds/tracinginthesand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world had been Bucky’s name and spoke with the scratch of sharp pencils on the fresh white tablets of drawing paper Bucky slid him like it meant nothing, until the way the world was took that away from him, too. But that wasn’t a story he wanted any of them to know, to take away and pore over for deeper meaning. </p><p>So when the historians asked him what life was like back then, he told them baseball reigned supreme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Seafarer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Livvy1800](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livvy1800/gifts).



> Livvy1800 was having a moment and posted a picture of Chris Evans in a Captain America t-shirt and my love is pure. I might add more chapters as time goes on!

Ever since he woke up in the throes of some psychologist’s “best guess” for how to acclimate a frozen time traveler to the future, Steve Rogers did a lot of thinking about the word _alone_ and what it meant.

The professionals he talked to had their own ideas about the implications of a man thrust forward into a world where he was on his own. The only 28-year-old from 1944 they had.

Everyone wanted to know what it was “really like,” but did they really want to know? The poverty, the fear, what it was like being a tiny queer with bum lungs who got along because his best friend in the world was the Junkyard King of Brooklyn Heights. Watching his mother die. The rattle in her chest when she told him how much she loved him, and how he should be happy, he should _be happy, Stevie_ , she told him, the last of her strength going to driving her blue mirror eyes into his so he knew what she meant. What she _meant_. She knew. Mothers don’t always know, but she did, and she loved him, and he held that too close for anyone to get.

What the war was really like? Blood and shit and him too good to get dirty. The smell of gunpowder and greasepaint and too many men who hadn’t gotten a shower, all looking at the girls so hungrily. And sometimes him, so hungrily.

Did they want to hear him describe the smell of French perfume on American women, the ones who finally told him they had to do something about that pesky virginity of his, and sent him reeling on plush bed in a chalet they were holed up in. While Bucky was somewhere being experimented on, and he didn’t know. He didn’t bother telling them, those lovely women with their jokes and their thumbed-over pictures of sweethearts back home when they exclaimed over his dick that it was always that big. Erskine’s serum couldn’t think of a thing to improve there, he giggled to himself. Secretly, grimly. _It’s the little guys you gotta watch, girls,_ he remembered Bucky saying, leer strapped to his gorgeous face like a parachute when a girl would turn her nose up at Bucky Barnes’s twisted, scrappy friend.

How it felt when he finally got Bucky out of that first hellhole and somewhere safe, when they were tucked into an Army tent with a hurricane lamp and Bucky said, breathless and almost terrified, Brooklyn so thick in the dark between them Steve couldn’t breathe through it— _show me what they did t’ya. All a’it. I wanna see it all—_ when Steve dropped his dirty, torn costume pants and stood there in his skin, big and gold and perfect, when Bucky actually gasped at the sight of him.

When Bucky’s lips curled up and he said what Steve thought right along, _Nothin’ that magic juice could do to your dick. Surprised it didn’t take a coupla inches off,_ and Steve laughed, he laughed and Bucky laughed. From relief, most of all, that they were still best friends, could still giggle over their dicks until they were snorting and choking themselves on their ratty, flea-infested pillows to keep the noise down. It almost took the shadows in Bucky’s eyes away, almost chased the murder out of them. But not completely. Never completely. There were reasons the Army'd put a sniper rifle in his hands. Bucky always had the knack.

Not Peggy Carter, not the Commandos, not his country, not even the promise of more evil to fight could keep him from the word _alone_ and what it meant after Steve dropped Bucky. Like the world became an ocean, and Steve Rogers was suddenly on a boat in the middle of it, exiled from everything he had ever known.

The world had been Bucky’s name and spoke with the scratch of sharp pencils on the fresh white tablets of drawing paper Bucky slid him like it meant nothing, until the way the world was took that away from him, too. But that wasn’t a story he wanted any of them to know, to take away and pore over for deeper meaning. So when the historians asked him what life was like back then, he told them baseball reigned supreme.

The thing about _alone_ , posited Steve, as he lay on the deck of a 30-foot sailboat anchored off the coast of Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, was that it implied separation from something that could be rejoined. Through exile or mischance, the awareness of being set apart and the possibility of reconciliation if certain criteria were met.

 _Alone_ , then, was not the right word for Steve’s situation. At least, not up until a few months ago, when he stood on a catwalk in a dying helicarrier and begged the only man he ever loved to remember, at the perceived cost of his own life.

Before then, he hadn’t been alone. He hadn’t even been lonely, particularly. He missed the people he’d known, desperately. He missed the clanking radiators and smell of cabbage in the walls. The familiar bite of cheek against teeth when he got punched in the face. (Although he had a bunch of new friends who were more than happy to help him recreate that experience.) The pleasing fear of being caught when he stuck his hand down his pants in the dead of night.

He considered it now. He was out in the middle of nowhere. But that was the last thing he needed, a passing helicopter or drone catching Captain America whacking it in broad daylight. He enjoyed the idea, the stir it would cause. Tasted every outraged tweet, every pundit on the major news networks trying to figure out family friendly ways of covering it. Being asked for comment about his masturbatory habits. _Well, Chris, it seemed like a nice day for it. Overcast, so I didn’t have to worry about low-orbital satellites. At least, not the low-orbital satellites you folks know about._

He’d even tell them the truth if they asked who he was thinking about. Dark hair, gray eyes on fire, metal arm. He shivered. That arm. Proof of the horror Bucky went through and proof he was still alive. Steve could drop to his knees and lick every one of those fingers.

The worn out blue t-shirt he wore with his shield on it (courtesy of Tony Stark’s sense of humor and Christmas morning) felt good against his fingertips as he slid them down his abs. It tickled, just lightly. Just like the hint of peril from Bucky’s fingers, a thousand times when they were kids. He wondered what Bucky’s body felt like. It wasn’t quite sexual. He just wanted to know, the same way Bucky wanted to know about him back in that tent in Austria in ’44. _Just show me a map, buddy. Show me where you been and what you are. I’ll take it from there._ Although even then, that night, Steve saw the thunder and the hunger in Bucky that he’d seen in those GIs at his performances. Not just a longing for Steve’s body, but a longing for what it meant. Protection. Approval. That the heroism he was physical proof of could exist.

Ironic, hypocritical, punishing proof, given that in their quest to defeat Hitler, American science and resources created his Übermensch.

Steve made his peace with the multiplicity of contradictions contained in his several hundred pounds of muscle, when he once struggled to take a deep breath. And in his heart of gold that longed for a body as hard and compromised as his own. He was going to hell. Bucky was already there, so Steve didn’t mind.

So he palmed his filling cock through his close-fitting jeans and rolled his shoulders against the friendly warm teak of the deck, smelling salt sea and gun oil. His eyes closed, sheltering him in personal darkness. The world still existed. But he was alone at sea.

He hadn’t been alone. He was now, desperately alone. Exiled from the only person who could understand. Bucky couldn’t, didn’t, was utterly adrift. Steve knew if they could somehow catch the Winter Soldier out of the sky, it would be a long, cold journey back for him. And Steve his only possible guide. Steve who knew so much, who had his file, who read it like it was the Holy Scriptures he carried when he was an altar boy. For Father Flanigan, the first bully Steve ever hit in the face. The first time he screamed for Bucky loud as he could, and Bucky came running. Bucky went to Sunday school after that. Broke his mama’s heart a little then.

That was what made Steve’s voice break on a groan, the idea of Bucky’s eyes filled with trapped fire and Steve the torch, the tinder, showing him the way. He talked to Sam, he talked to Natasha and Clint, long conversations about what they went through. To Thor. To Loki, when he could pin him down. Literally. That’s the only way Loki would talk to him, pinned by the wrists and grinning promises into his eyes.

If you’re going to be a hero, he thought, you better enjoy some parts of it.

Steve pumped his dick slowly, the past swirling around him, iridescent like an oil slick. The past he remembered, the pasts he’d been told, the past that slid over him while he was in the ice, leaving no sign.

It felt like forever, he floated there. His body remembered when they had to work together to reach it, when there wasn’t enough blood or enough air and it made him lightheaded. He trapped his coughing in his chest so no one would check on him, then, sobbing into his pillow for how much work pleasure was.

His orgasm came over him, the wash of a swell a few feet away, pulled from his spine the way they sometimes were. He wondered if that was supposed to make up for it all. He was a fucking mess, his life was a wreck, but he could pull one off easy as anything, now. Didn’t even have to think about it, particularly.

_“Christ, Rogers, dirty fuck, ain’tcha?”_

So Steve knew it couldn’t be Bucky saying those words, as he lay, hazy and relaxed, come drying in his jeans and on his fingers. It couldn’t be anyone. His fantasies came on him afterwards these days. His mind blank and blissful while he worked himself over, and flooded with half-real scraps of reality and desire afterward. 

_“At least clean off your fingers, you cherry punk. I gotta teach you everything?”_

He didn’t understand men who got so all-fired strange about it on its own merits, as long as everyone involved was clean. He’d shown his age one time when he referred to “VD” on national television. He pulled his hand out of his pants and brought it to his mouth without thinking too hard about answering the sexual demands from his feverish imaginings of his best friend. It tasted fine. He heard footsteps on the deck in his fantasy, and imagined Bucky looking down at him with a mix of exasperation and banked delight on his face.

“Learned this without you, Bucky,” he said. “You let me down. Let me down real bad. Gonna fix it?”

“ _I’m not the one you wanted_ ,” that Bucky said. “ _Can’t fix anything now. I’m the broken one, here_.”

“We’re both broken,” Steve murmured, the freedom of it lifting his heart.

“ _Well, there you go_.” Bucky sounded satisfied in Steve’s head, like they’d established something important and were in complete agreement.

“Always wanted to do this with you,” he whispered.

“Fuck?” The word was accented improperly.

“Go on a boat, you asshole,” Steve muttered, wiping his spit-wet fingers off on his jeans.

The only answer he got was a disgruntled hum. The boat floated, he floated on it, his eyes still closed, like they might never open again. The muscles in his eyelids wanted to twitch and show him the world, bright and gray and unforgiving above him like the sky was made of ice, the way the sky looked the day he dropped Bucky.

“You didn’t drop me,” Bucky said. The problem with talking to figments of one’s imagination, Steve reflected sourly. They could answer statements you didn’t speak out loud. Or maybe he had, he didn’t know. The light above him was swirling in his eyelids. “You didn’t catch me.””

“Same difference.”

“No.” Same swallowed roundness to the vowel. Same wrongness. Like the Winter Soldier’s growl on the helicarrier, a voice that didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up.

“Explain it to me, pal,” Steve said. Reality tugged at him. Somewhere on the sailboat lay his phone, gone but not forgotten. It had reminders and message notifications.

“I can’t. You lie there with all the cares in the world on your shoulders. I have nothing to do but avoid paying the piper. You did not drop me. I wasn’t strong enough to hold until you could get to me.”

“Are you strong enough this time?” Steve asked on a whisper. The voice wasn’t Brooklyn. The voice was washed out, flattened, frozen and thawed, language after language forced into it and driven away. Steve kept his eyes resolutely. Squeezed them until checkerboard starbursts exploded along his vision behind the curtain. Veins forking like lightning. “Bucky?”

“Not it,” that voice said, echoes of singsong on the playground.

Steve forced his eyes open, blinded by all the light that had built up, just waiting for a gap in his armor. A dark silhouette against the grand expanse of the cloudy sky, like a darker plume of smoke from the factories on the waterfront got trapped in an enormous bowl over his head.

He had to blink. There was the hint of a splash, and he jumped to his feet, staring over the side where he heard the noise. His t-shirt snapped against his body in the wind, the gaping neck letting cool air over his collarbones. He stood on deck, alone. A state of being indicating exile, through misstep or mischance. As yet unreconciled.

And the Winter Soldier hugged the side of the boat just at the waterline, where the Target, who had become the Man on the Bridge, who had become the Man in the River, who had become Captain America, Captain Steven Rogers, who, he was told by museum exhibits, had before any of those things became him, been the guy who dragged him on adventures and into fights, whose smile could light up Brooklyn.

He felt the man walking back and forth, could hear thousands of sleepless nights in those boots. They both wore combat boots. It satisfied something in him. Maybe there was someone like him after all. Maybe he wasn’t so alone.

Whatever alone meant.


End file.
